A scene from Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), now screening at Acmi in Melbourne

My mind is foggy and my eyes are bleary. The time is exactly 2.52am. I know this because Jack Nicholson is on the big screen in front of me, seated near an analogue clock with its hands pointed towards the camera, in a shot lifted from the 1972 drama The King of Marvin Gardens.

In the film I am watching – the visual artist Christian Marclay’s mosaical epic the Clock, which runs for a butt-flattening 24 hours and is the world’s most popular piece of concept art – the time on screen always matches the time in real life. Debuting in London in 2010, The Clock strings together some 12,000 short clips from thousands of film and TV scenes, almost all in some way referring to the time – via lines of dialogue for instance, or, more commonly, shots of clocks and watches.

'It's impossible!' – Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips

Read more

Is time a human fiction, or one of few obviously real things in an endlessly confusing world? I ponder this while slouching in an underground space at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image complex in Melbourne. It’s decked out with three columns of symmetrically arranged rectangular couches, like something out of my favourite feature film: Jacques Tati’s 1967 modernist comedy Playtime.

I attended The Clock for the long haul: apart from meal breaks and breaths of fresh air, I was there the entire 24 hours. Having recently moved back to Melbourne after five years living in Sydney, I was keen to see how it might make me think about cities, the vast majority of it transpiring in metropolitan and suburban settings. Marclay’s audiovisual odyssey has come to Australia before, exhibited at the MCA in Sydney in 2013, but it feels like a Melbourne event through and through, befitting an arts capital that’s vibrant, eclectic and indoorsy.

And the film was strangely addictive from the moment I began watching about 9am last Thursday.

The unconventional qualities of The Clock remind us that story doesn’t necessarily account for all that much if a film’s other elements are strong enough, because form always trumps content. If you consider film and TV shows in terms of what happened rather than how it happened, as the current spoiler-obsessed culture encourages, you rob yourself of the most satisfying elements.

A week before watching The Clock, I stood across the road from Acmi, attending the Australia Day protests. The crowd extended way down Flinders and Swanston streets. The atmosphere was electric. We were bound by the same goal: a desire for change. I was reminded of this through The Clock’s rich tapestry of city life. Marclay strings together visions of people doing similar things at similar times, creating a feeling of shared identity and common purpose. Perhaps the best word for this is simply “community”.

One thing about the film that took me by surprise was the number and breadth of human faces – there are more of them than clock faces. Every person projects a different set of emotions. If it is a film about time it is a film about moments; particularly how these moments capture and reflect human experience. One of the underlying observations, made continuously and without subtlety, is that time is precious and limited. Which makes the film very powerfully about mortality.

My mind swelled with memories triggered by that word. For a second I was back at my grandmother’s deathbed, watching her take her final breath, her beautiful blue eyes opening and closing for the last time. For a second I was back saying goodbye to a good friend who died by his own hand, thinking there is nothing sadder than a young person’s funeral. I was back at a chapel listening to a eulogy for a family member who was murdered, wondering if the police would ever catch the culprit.

‘Philosophically speaking, we can never fully trust our memory’

Read more

During the hours from about midnight to 4am, The Clock has many scenes of people in bed. If you have not slept yourself this is tiring and strange, relegating the viewer to a perspective that feels almost omnipotent. When I take a walk about 4.30am, down the near-empty Elizabeth Street, I look at the people around me and a strange thought enters my head: that I have seen these people when they are sleeping. I resist mentioning this to two young and quite drunk passersby, who are brandishing cheeseburgers and striking up conversation.

Back at Acmi, The Clock makes me recall that crappy dad joke about how the past, the present and the future walk into a bar. (It was tense!) It also makes me ponder how, given that the present always becomes the past, and the future remains forever uncertain, perhaps the only thing of everlasting value – in films and cities alike – are the memories they create. Time as we understand it only marches forward but our minds are not bound by the same linear structure.

When you spend 24 hours watching a concept art film, these are the kind of philosophical corridors your mind wanders down. The very nature of time becomes surreal.